27.5.04

The town where the authors of this joint project live is divided into two parts and has two names, Valga and Valka. In between: the Estonian – Latvian border.

Latvian Uldis Balga from Valka and Nils Rebane, former border guard in Valga both found that the border is unnecessary and disturbing, to the point of getting Utopian thoughts, as described in one song by John Lennon: “Imagine there’s no borders...”

What they did to bring their divided territory in focus could be a performance or a ritual: Balga walking along the border on “his”, the Latvian side and ten meters next to him Rebane, on Estonian ground. They protocol the same border posts and behind is the foreign land, land from which they are separated. Through picturing the other’s territory while one’s own is being pictured, in a way they regain power over it and seem to overcome the separation.

Sometimes they meet in each other’s viewfinders – but it remains two views from a distance, enlarged at home using one’s own negative frame that creates two different borders on the images [straight black on Rebane’s prints and smooth on Balga’s ]. When displayed, the edges of these images touch, two focuses in one, 180 degrees different – the border is larger than ever.

23.5.04

Until Sadie Plant's talk at Futuresonic, I'd missed one of the most socially significant aspects of mobile phones: that they have a functional bias against the expansion of social networks, and thus a bias towards intimacy. Phone books exist for landlines, and most email addresses are available publicly somewhere. But there is no public way of getting a cell phone number. Hence cell phones become like comfort blankets to people partly because they represent everyone who you already know reasonably well.

The English word "welsh" was the Old English word for "foreigner" or "outsider". It was, at the time, a very insulting term to use. It survives in place names with a wal- element, such as Walcot ("the cottage of the foreigners") ... Some Latin-sounding name elements were adopted by the Anglo Saxons, after Roman occupation, because they needed words to describe things they found in the British landscape that they had no word of their own for ... In south Wiltshire there's a concentration of -font suffixes (Urchfont, Teffont, etc). We think these were Anglo Saxon attempts to use the Latin word fontana to explain Roman water features, like irrigation systems and aquaducts.

(hurriedly typed and edited) notes from a talk in the public library last night, on the subject of Wiltshire's place names
Giles Turnbull